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434 books match the query 'Criticism & Theory' and 54 start with a

cover of As for Protocols

As for Protocols

Edited by Re'al Christian, Carin Kuoni, and Eriola Pira

Amherst College Press, 2025

Explicitly—or not—protocols determine much of what we do. Far exceeding traditional notions of “good manners,” protocols are systems of language that regulate how we relate to each other, to our cultural, social, and political environments, and to the technologies that create them. The first publication to look at protocols across a wide range of disciplines, As for Protocols brings together contributions by twenty-two international artists, writers, scholars, musicians, architects, and scientists who explore protocols across various fields, foregrounding opportunities for creating new protocols that are inclusive and equitable. Through essays, artworks, interviews, and scores, the book speaks to protocols as practice—neither conventional mannerisms nor abstract concepts, but material processes, relational affinities, shared responsibilities, and mutual care.

Edited by Re’al Christian, Carin Kuoni, and Eriola Pira, an opening score by Raven Chacon and contributions by Salome Asega, Carolina Caycedo with Lupita Limón Corrales, Raven Chacon, Jesse Chun, Asia Dorsey, Taraneh Fazeli and Cannach MacBride, Pablo Helguera, Emmanuel Iduma, Mary Maggic, Shannon Mattern, V. Mitch McEwen with Nadir Jeevanjee, Rashaun Mitchell with Silas Riener, Romy Opperman, Rasheedah Phillips, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson with Maria Hupfield, Ultra-red with Robert Sember, and Underground Resistance.
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cover of Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media

Atmospheres of Projection

Environmentality in Art and Screen Media

Giuliana Bruno

University of Chicago Press, 2022

Bringing together cultural history, visual studies, and media archaeology, Bruno considers the interrelations of projection, atmosphere, and environment.
 
Projection has long been transforming space, from shadow plays to camera obscuras and magic lantern shows. Our fascination with projection is alive on the walls of museums and galleries and woven into our daily lives. Giuliana Bruno explores the histories of projection and atmosphere in visual culture and their continued importance to contemporary artists who are reinventing the projective imagination with atmospheric thinking and the use of elemental media. 

To explain our fascination with projection and atmosphere, Bruno traverses psychoanalysis, environmental philosophy, architecture, the history of science, visual art, and moving image culture to see how projective mechanisms and their environments have developed over time. She reveals how atmosphere is formed and mediated, how it can change, and what projection can do to modify a site. In so doing, she gives new life to the alchemic possibilities of transformative projective atmospheres. Showing how their “environmentality” produces sites of exchange and relationality, this book binds art to the ecology of atmosphere.


 
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cover of Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism

Autonomy

The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism

Nicholas Brown

Duke University Press, 2019

In Autonomy Nicholas Brown theorizes the historical and theoretical argument for art's autonomy from its acknowledged character as a commodity. Refusing the position that the distinction between art and the commodity has collapsed, Brown demonstrates how art can, in confronting its material determinations, suspend the logic of capital by demanding interpretive attention. He applies his readings of Marx, Hegel, Adorno, and Jameson to a range of literature, photography, music, television, and sculpture, from Cindy Sherman's photography and the novels of Ben Lerner and Jennifer Egan to The Wire and the music of the White Stripes. He demonstrates that through their attention and commitment to form, such artists turn aside the determination posed by the demand of the market, thereby defeating the foreclosure of meaning entailed in commodification. In so doing, he offers a new theory of art that prompts a rethinking of the relationship between art, critical theory, and capitalism.
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cover of Avant-Garde Museology: e-flux classics

Avant-Garde Museology

e-flux classics

Arseny Zhilyaev

University of Minnesota Press, 2015

The museum of contemporary art might be the most advanced recording device ever invented. It is a place for the storage of historical grievances and the memory of forgotten artistic experiments, social projects, or errant futures. But in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia, this recording device was undertaken by artists and thinkers as a site for experimentation.

Arseny Zhilyaev’s Avant-Garde Museology presents essays documenting the wildly encompassing progressivism of this period by figures such as Nikolai Fedorov, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Bogdanov, and others—many which are translated from the Russian for the first time. Here the urgent question is: How might the contents of the museum be reanimated so as to transcend even the social and physical limits imposed on humankind?

Contributors: David Arkin; Vladimir Bekhterev; Alexander Bogdanov; Osip Brik; Vasiliy Chekrygin; Leonid Chetyrkin; Nikolai Druzhinin; Nikolai Fedorov; Pavel Florensky; R. N. Frumkina; M. S. Ilkovskiy; V. I. Karmilov; V. Karpov; Valentin Kholtsov; P. N. Khrapov; Yuriy Kogan; Natalya Kovalenskaya; Nadezhda Krupskaya; S. P. Lebedyansky; A. F. Levitsky; Vera Leykina (Leykina-Svirskaya); Ivan Luppol; Kazimir Malevich; Andrey Platonov; Nikolay Punin; Aleksandr Rodchenko; Yuriy Samarin; I. F. Sheremet; Andrey Shestakov; Natan Shneerson; Ivan Skulenko; M. Vorobiev; N. Vorontsovsky; Boris Zavadovsky; I. M. Zykov. 

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